The Woman Who Ran with Wolves
by drekadair
Summary: Peter and Nightingale are called to the Epping Forest to investigate a potential werewolf and discover a missing woman, a family shattered by grief, and a case that hits far too close to home.
1. Part I

**AN** : While no suicide occurs in this story, suicide and suicidal ideation are discussed. If such topics are difficult for you to read about, this may not be the story for you.

* * *

And you once said, "I wish you dead, you sinner."

I'll never be more than a wolf at your door for dinner.

\- "Wolf," Phildel

 **Part One**

Weekend mornings at the Folly are a leisurely affair. Unless there's an urgent case there's no police work and Nightingale doesn't make me practice magic, either. Molly still serves breakfast at eight o'clock sharp, though, so I don't really get to lay around in bed unless I want a dirty look from her when I creep into the kitchen late looking for leftovers. Not that I spend much time in laying in bed these days, what with post-Lesley insomnia and all, and anyway I've stayed at Beverly's almost every weekend since we got back from Herefordshire. But Beverly had kicked me out to study for her first chemistry quiz and I'd actually started sleeping better lately—Nightingale would probably attribute it to the beneficial effects of country air, which is why I didn't say anything to him about it—so I actually slept in that morning and that's why I came down to breakfast half an hour late.

Molly glared at me as I slipped into the breakfast room and I gave her my best little-boy grin, the one I've used against both Lady Ty and my own mum, but Molly was visibly unimpressed. Nightingale was at the table doing the crossword with a cup of tea at his elbow, but his plate had already been whisked away. There was still plenty of food, though, so I helped myself and sat opposite him.

"Good morning," he said without looking up.

"Morning," I answered. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and gray tweed blazer but no tie—it was, after all, a Saturday. He still put my khakis and navy jumper to shame, but I knew I had no hope of keeping up with Nightingale so I wasn't bothered by it. I applied myself to tea and toast and was about to ask Nightingale to spare me a section of paper—I wasn't picky, even the sports would do—when the phone rang.

Molly, approaching the table with a fresh pot of tea, paused. We all stared at one another before I remembered myself and got up to answer it. Usually when someone from the Met needed us they knew to call my cell phone, since a call to the landline was usually just met by Molly's creepy silence. I picked up the receiver in the lobby on the fifth ring and said, "Folly."

There was a pause and then a woman asked, "Is this the Specialist Assessment Unit?"

"That's us."

"Do you know anything about werewolves?"

I hesitated. "Who is this, please?"

She introduced herself as Diane Paget, a DCI with the Essex Territorial Police Force who thought she had a werewolf on her hands.

"A werewolf," I repeated.

"That's what you deal with, isn't it?" she asked. "Werewolves and weird stuff like that."

Werewolves were new, but weird stuff I was used to. "What makes you think there's a werewolf involved?"

Late Thursday night Lynn Macey, widow and mother of two, had vanished from her home in Theydon Bois, which I thought was northeast of London somewhere. There was no sign of violence and if it hadn't been for the two parentless kids the police might not have been too concerned. Then early this morning a jogger found Macey's torn clothes in the Epping Forest, only half a kilometer from her house.

"I took one look at the scene and knew something was off," Paget said.

The clothes, the same ones Macey had been wearing Thursday night, were in a loose heap near a popular footpath. The soft earth and leaf litter was perfect for holding footprints, and sure enough there was a clear set of prints matching Macey's shoes leading up to the scene—and large canine prints leading away.

It did sound suspicious, but nothing I'd read so far suggested werewolves were common and the moon was only in the first quarter—after dealing with unicorns in Rushpool I'd made it a habit to keep track of the current lunar phase. Still, no police officer called the Folly without being well and truly desperate, so Paget was either crazy or really convinced there was something odd about her case.

"Let me check some references," I told her. "I'll get right back to you."

I jotted down her number on the notepad next to the phone and went back to the breakfast room. I could double-check Wolfe's _Exotica_ but asking Nightingale was faster.

"Werewolves?" Nightingale said, when I told him about Paget's missing person. "As far as I know, there aren't any in here in Britain."

Apparently werewolves had always been more of a European thing. Reports from the British Isles were rare, and none of them confirmed. Even Continental cases were poorly documented, leading some to doubt their very existence.

"Wolfe thought the stories come from people affected by some kind of magical delusion, didn't he?" I asked, thinking back on all the reading I'd done to figure out what the Pale Lady was.

" _Seducere_ ," Nightingale agreed. "Like poor Melvin Starkey."

Who had been glamored by the spirit of the Grand Union canal into believing he was a rat. "What about the Nazis?" I asked. "Didn't they have werewolves?"

Nightingale sipped his tea thoughtfully. "We were never entirely sure what their capabilities were," he said. "They were certainly practitioners of some sort and were called werwölfe, but we had no evidence they could actually transform themselves into wolves. It does seem unlikely," he added. "Such magic would be extraordinarily difficult for a human practitioner, if possible at all."

"For a _human_ practitioner," I repeated. "Could some kind of fae do this?"

"There are some…" I could see him hesitating over the word _species_ , or possibly _races_. "…types of fae capable of changing their shape. They are extremely rare, and to my knowledge none of them are capable of taking the shape of a wolf or any other kind of canine."

"So probably not a werewolf in Theydon Bois, then."

"Probably not," Nightingale agreed. "What was your impression of DCI Paget?"

"She didn't sound crazy," I said, knowing what he meant. "Or like she was trying to fob the case off on our budget."

"Then she must be desperate," Nightingale said. "Perhaps it would be best for you to drive out and have a look 'round."

So much for my Saturday, I thought, and went to give Paget the good news.

I took the A12 east, crossing the River Lea at Stratford and heading north on the M11. The road paralleled the River Roding for a while; I caught a few glimpses of it through the trees, beginning to show their fall colors, on my left. I spent some time trying to remember where the Roding emptied into the Thames and whether I had met her yet before my satnav had me get off at Loughton. Leafy suburbs gave way to farm fields and patchy forest, with a couple golf courses thrown in for variety. It was more urban than Herefordshire, which was good because I'd just about had my fill of the country, but also more wooded. I drove through Theydon Bois proper, which was a nice little village, though strangely lacking in streetlights, and onto a side street that cut through the Epping Forest. After missing my turn and having to double back, I found myself in a small gravel lot beside a row of seriously nice houses with gated drives and privacy hedges—some of which, I noted, included what looked suspiciously like small palm trees.

There was a uniformed PC and a woman in a white button-down shirt and heavy-duty khakis waiting for me in the lot next to an elderly Ford Escort that was just as obviously ex-panda as mine was. There were two other cars in the lot, a gray Astra and a late-model Prius. I squeezed the Asbo between the Astra and the Prius and walked over to say hello.

The PC was a mixed-race man about my age but a few shades lighter named Gabriel Zuberi. His companion turned out to be a Forest Keeper, a tall, willowy Asian woman with a solid Estuary accent who introduced herself as Min Ji Yi. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and they told me DCI Paget had asked them to show me to the scene when I arrived.

We started down a wide trail leading from the lot into the forest, along the side of the first of the row of houses. Another high hedge blocked the view into the house's back yard on our left; to the right, the trees were just turning brilliant bronze and gold above a thick carpet of leaf litter and a sparse layer of undergrowth. The temperature was cool but not cold, the sun shone brightly through the canopy overhead, and not even the prospect of werewolves could stop me from enjoying such a perfect fall day.

I asked Yi what kind of trees we were walking under.

"Beech," she said, sounding disappointed but not surprised at my ignorance, and without prompting launched into an explanation of forest management in Epping Forest. Which seemed to largely revolve around pollarding, the practice of cutting back trees so they produce new growth of even thickness for cutting.

"After the Epping Forest Act of 1878 harvest ceased and pollarded trees were allowed to grow unchecked," she said, "to the point that they could no longer support the weight of their own branches. This results in an abundance of dead wood, which is good for fungi, but also in a closed canopy, which is bad for understory plants."

I had the feeling this was a speech she gave often. I also had the feeling she and Zuberi were curious about what the heck I was doing here, but neither was bold enough to come out and ask and I wasn't going to volunteer anything about "weird stuff" until I knew how much Paget wanted me to volunteer. We turned right at a junction and found ourselves surrounded on forest on both sides. It was cooler under the trees, the sunlight muted. After another two hundred meters or so along the packed-dirt path I caught the distinct flash of police tape ahead.

DCI Paget was waiting for us beside the trail. She was a dark-haired white woman with the kind of handsome face that ought to go with a figure of statuesque proportions but was in her case was paired with petite, plump body. She greeted me and shook my hand with more politeness than I was used to from officers who felt compelled to call on the Folly's expertise.

"Sorry about your weekend," she said. "But I want you to have a look at this."

"This" was about twenty meters west of where we stood but clearly visible from the path despite that, there being little undergrowth due to the overgrown trees, remember. From a distance it looked a little like someone sleeping on the ground, though it could just as easily have been mistaken for a pile of rubbish.

"A jogger noticed it this morning when her dog started acting strangely," Paget explained as she led me over. We took a circuitous route, circling around the little heap so we came at it from the far side. "Said she thought it was a body at first."

Epping Forest being infamous for body dumps, though Paget insisted it didn't happen as often as the media would lead you to believe. The jogger investigated, much to her dog's dismay, and quickly realized it wasn't a body, dead or alive. But, like the upstanding citizen, she was—her words, not Paget's—she called the Forest Keepers anyway, fly tipping being a major concern in the forest. Since Yi was already in the area she biked over, mountain bikes apparently one of the Forest Keepers' preferred means of covering ground, and saw that, far from being a random pile of rubbish, the pile of discarded clothes matched the description of those last seen on Lynn Macey. That's when Paget's Saturday morning was derailed, several hours earlier than my own. A couple of forensics types had already come and gone, but Paget had insisted the clothing remain in place until I could arrive.

"Here are the footprints leading in," Paget said, pointing at the ground. To my Londoner's eye it just looked like a thick layer of dead leaves, churned up by the boots of the coppers and forensic team who had already been over the scene. I said as much, and she assured me the footprints had been preliminarily matched to the victim's shoes—final confirmation awaited a lab comparison of the shoes and casts taken from the scene.

"She probably came in from the golf course," Paget said, gesturing to the east, away from the trail I came in on. I looked and could make out an open space on through the trees. "Macey's house is just on the other side. Cutting across the fairway would be the fastest way to reach this spot on foot."

I picked my way carefully across the disturbed ground toward the pile of clothing, trying not to step on the invisible footprints. I meant to crouch down for a closer look but as I bent forward a wave of _vestigia_ hit me so hard I actually lost my balance and wound up on my knees in the dirt. Clean fur, the sensation of running flat out but effortlessly, snow and pine pitch, the copper tang of blood on my tongue, and underneath is all an overwhelming _need_ , like hunger or thirst but nothing to do with food or water.

"Constable Grant?" Paget stood behind me, her voice concerned, uncertain.

I shook my head, trying to clear away the sensations. The taste of blood was so strong I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, convinced I must have bitten myself. But there was no wound, just one of the strongest _vestigium_ I had ever encountered.

"You said she was a widow," I said, to cover my shakiness. "What happened to her husband?"

"Phillip Macey. Died in a car accident two years ago."

I was getting my breath back and pulled a pair of gloves out of my pocket. "And her kids?"

"There's two of them. Aiden is fifteen, Katherine's eight. They're staying with their uncle and his family in Waltham Abbey—father's side," Paget added, before I could ask.

I slipped into the gloves and started going through the clothes. A pair of practical walking shoes, well broken in but not worn. Only one sock. Blue jeans, one leg pulled inside-out. The knickers were about a meter away, torn to shreds. A flannel shirt, both arms torn at the shoulders, half the buttons missing. The bra, remarkably undamaged and still clasped in the back. The leaves and dirt around the area were badly disturbed, as though by a violent struggle.

There was no blood anywhere. I mentioned that and Paget told me one of the only things they had bagged from the scene was a pair of earrings, bloodied as though they'd been torn out of Macey's ears. Her cell phone had also gone to the lab, which would have been my next question.

"Where's the paw prints?" I asked.

Paget showed me. Most of the trail I couldn't make heads or tails of, but there was one, on a patch of bare ground, that even I could see was a print made by some kind of large dog. Very large.

"Well?" Paget demanded, after I'd stared at the print in shock for a few moments. "Is this your shout?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "This is weird stuff, all right."


	2. Part II

**AN** : Paget's story is loosely borrowed from Seven Tears into the Sea, by Terri Farley.

* * *

Wolf mother, where you been?

You look so worn, so thin.

\- "Wolf," First Aid Kit

 **Part Two**

Me and Paget walked back to the parking lot while Zuberi finished bagging up the scene. I asked her why she'd been so quick to call the Folly.

"Usually other branches stay as far away from us as they can get," I pointed out.

She gave me a long, considering look out of the corner of her eye and countered with a question of her own. "You called it 'weird stuff.' What does that mean, exactly?"

I could tell the "perfectly rational explanation" flannel I'd used on Dominic wasn't going to cut it with her. "It means magic is real."

She thought about that for a minute. "Aliens?"

I sighed. "No. No aliens."

Paget laughed. "I bet you get that a lot." The laughter faded slowly from her face. "I grew up in West Lulworth, in Dorset," she said. "When I was a kid, I would go down to the beach at night, watch the waves. One night I saw… I saw a man walk into the water. He wasn't swimming or anything. He just walked into the breakers and never came out again. My parents thought…" She shook her head once, sharply. "Anyway, they told me never to tell anyone. And I never have. Until now."

I wondered what she'd seen that night. Probably not a River, not in salt water. Nightingale had hinted at mermaids once, but it could have been anything, really. The number of things I didn't know about magic frustrated the hell out of me sometimes.

We reached parking lot and Paget stopped and looked me in the eye. "Constable, is Lynn Macey a werewolf?"

"I don't know," I said. "But I'm going to find out."

* * *

I asked if I could have a look round Lynn Macey's house and Paget said she'd meet me over there to unlock it and show me around. This was a suspicious amount of attention for a DCI to give a PC and I wasn't sure if it was because she wanted to know more about magic or just didn't want me fraternizing with her officers. Either way there was no point in me saying anything about it so I climbed back into the Asbo, got the satnav going, and started backtracking to Theydon Bois. I called Nightingale as I pulled out of the lot and put him on speakerphone so I could talk while I drove.

"This is definitely one of ours," I said, and described the _vestigium_ I'd sensed on Macey's clothes and the lack of blood. "I can see why Paget thought werewolf. She probably caught some of the _vestigium_ , it was that strong."

"What do you think happened?" Nightingale asked.

"I have no idea," I admitted. "There were definitely wolf-like prints, but I can't tell if she actually turned into a wolf. Something could have carried her off, or attacked her. Even if she did transform there's no way to tell if she did it on purpose or if was done to her." I was thinking of the Faceless Man's chimeras. "Werewolf seems as good a working theory as any, but I don't want to make assumptions."

"An excellent policy," Nightingale said. "I shall check the library for any references more enlightening than Wolfe's _Exotica_."

As the crow flies, Macey's house was less than a kilometer from where her clothes were found, but I had to drive all the way back to the village center and then turn into a neighborhood of mock-Tudor semis with lots of BMWs and Audis in the driveways. The place I was looking for was tucked into a corner where the road made a bend, almost hidden behind the two larger houses on either side. It was small, single-storey detached cottage with diamond-pane windows and blue-glazed terracotta planters lining the walk up to the front door. The planters were empty of anything except bare dirt and the front yard was tidy but barren-looking, especially compared to the careful landscaping of the neighbors. Despite this apparent horticultural apathy I could see a conservatory peeking around the side of the house.

Paget was just getting out of her car when I parked on the street. There was another car in the driveway, a newish Volkswagon.

"Is this Macey's car?" I asked.

Paget said that it was, and both sets of keys had been found inside the house. Obviously Macey hadn't driven to Epping Forest. The front door was closed and symbolically barred with a strip of police tape. Paget unlocked it and lifted the tape for me.

The house was laid out in a T-shape, the entryway opening up into a living room, dining room and kitchen to the right, smaller bedroom to the left, second and master bedrooms in the back. The furniture was nice, not matching but it all went well together. There was a coffee table that actually had coffee table books on it, of the art photography kind, though not many books otherwise. There was a fine layer of fingerprint dust on everything.

A large-screen TV was mounted on one wall with a DVD player, X-Box, and Playstation on shelves underneath, along with a couple of controllers and a scattering of games and discs in their cases. The rest of the walls were mostly taken up by large photographic prints, all of them nature shots: fall leaves in a puddle, a crow looking over its shoulder, a country lane wreathed in fog. One showed a forest awfully similar to the one I'd just been in.

"She's a photographer?" I asked.

"These are all hers," Paget said. "She does freelance work."

I wondered how much a freelance photographer made and whether it was enough to support two kids, a nice house, and a good car. Paget grinned.

"I asked the same thing, but she owns the house. Paid for it with the sale of her husband's business after he died. He ran a local chain of hardware stores," she added, before I could ask.

I pulled on a second pair of gloves and started poking around. For a house with two kids it was pretty clean, though not professionally so. I guessed Macey did her own housework. There was nothing unusual in the living room, aside from a few gardening books that seemed out of place with the plain front yard. I checked the computer, which wasn't password-protected, and spent a couple of minutes looking through her files. I didn't know enough to really search a computer properly and I'd need a tech guy to find hidden or deleted files, but a quick glance showed a lot of innocuous emails and a lot of photographs and photo-editing programs. The photographs were sorted into folders by client, mostly weddings and newborn babies, with a lot more that seemed to be Macey's personal work—more nature shots.

I moved into the dining room and kitchen and turned up a blank there, too. There was a menu for the week scribbled on a piece of paper and stuck to the fridge with an apple-shaped magnet. Saturday night was spaghetti and meatballs.

"What time did she go missing on Thursday?"

"We're still working that out." It turned out Macey was in the habit of going for nighttime walks in Epping Forest, which was technically illegal, and sometimes stayed out all night. I asked what she was doing out there, but apparently no one knew. Having done a bit of nocturnal forest-wandering myself I couldn't understand why someone would voluntarily spend time in the woods at night when they could be in a pub or even their own comfortable bed instead, but I suppose it takes all types.

Whatever it was she got up to in the forest, she was almost always home in time to get her kids ready for school in the morning. "But not Friday morning," Paget said. "It wasn't the first time, though, so they didn't panic until they got back from school Friday afternoon and found she was still gone."

At which point Aiden, the teen, called his uncle, who came over, assessed the situation, and called the police.

"To be honest," Paget said, "We thought at first she might have gone somewhere in the forest to commit suicide." Since the car was still in the driveway and there was no indication Macey had taken anything with her it seemed unlikely she had simply run away with a secret boyfriend. Preliminary interviews with Aiden and Katherine suggested Macey's behavior had been unusual over the past couple of weeks, and a quick check of her medicine cabinet had turned up a prescription bottle of antidepressants. But that theory went out the window when they found her discarded clothes.

I checked the kids' rooms next, though I didn't expect to find much. Katherine's room had a lot of little-girl pink, but when I looked closer I saw that all the dolls and ponies were tucked away on shelves or in baskets, while scattered around in a way indicative of frequent use was an impressive collection of Legos. Aiden's room indicated he had largely outgrown the toy stage, though there were a few worn stuffed animals that probably had sentimental value. He had a couple of bookcases crammed with books, mostly running toward sci-fi, with some fantasy thrown in. I spotted the complete Harry Potter series, well-worn, alongside a creased paperback copy of Frank Herbert's _Dune_. There was no sign of cell phones or laptops, but the kids had probably taken those with them to their uncle's house.

Paget leaned against the doorway, watching me. "What are you looking for, exactly?" she asked.

Usually the SIO on any case I was involved in wanted to know as little about what I was doing at possible. Her interest wasn't unwelcome, just surprising. Actually, it was kind of nice to feel like I was actually working _with_ her, as part of her team, instead of some kind leper.

"I'm checking for signs anyone in the house is a practitioner—someone who does magic," I explained.

"Anything so far?"

"Nothing yet."

I moved into the master bedroom. Again, few books but lots of photos on the walls. The closet was tidy, a modest number of shoes lined up on the floor. There were several pairs of running shoes and a lot of athletic clothes hanging up, and I guessed Macey was an avid jogger, which Paget confirmed. There were no men's clothes in the closet, which wasn't too surprising since the husband had died two years ago, but his stuff had been cleared so thoroughly from the house that if no one had told me about him I would never have guessed there had ever been a husband.

That thought made me backtrack to Aiden's room. On his desk, half-hidden behind the desktop lamp, was a framed photograph in an easel frame. I picked it up to see it better. It was a family photo, but not one of those studio ones where everyone looks stiff and posed. It had been taken beside a lake in late spring. Everything looked bright and green and I could see ducks on the water in the background. A little girl with her hair in plaits and an older boy grinned up at the camera from either side of a good-looking white man in his early thirties with an arm slung around each of the kids' shoulders. I guessed this was Katherine, Aiden, and Phillip Macey. They all looked breathless and happy, like they'd been running or playing and then caught by surprise by the camera. It was the only picture of the family I'd seen anywhere in the house.

"Find something?" Paget asked.

"Maybe. Do you have a picture of Macey?"

She said she'd send it to me and I went outside to check the conservatory and the garden. I could tell the garden had once been beautifully landscaped, but although the lawn was trimmed and the beds weeded it had an air of neglect. The conservatory was a mess, pots everywhere and a bag of potting soil half-spilled on the pavers that no one had bothered to sweep up. All the plants were dead, brown skeletons protruding from their pots, and there were spiderwebs everywhere. I guessed no one had been in here for a couple of years.

I went back to the garden and peered over the rear fence. On the other side was the golf course, then the road, and past that the edge of Epping Forest. It wasn't far. I could easily see a fit, athletic woman like Macey climbing the fence and cutting across the fairway to reach the forest. I looked around and, sure enough, there were two more blue-glazed pots, turned upside-down to serve as steps, one on either side of the fence.

I had a middle-aged woman with depression who liked running, enjoyed walking in the woods at night, and would rather take pictures of trees than her own children. There was no sign anyone in the family was practitioner and even the _vestigia_ was exactly what I'd expect from a house of that age. It didn't exactly add up to _werewolf_. The problem was, it didn't seem to add up to anything else, either.

* * *

With Paget's blessing, I drove over to Waltham Abbey to talk to Macey's family. She had two sisters, but neither was close—one in York and the other, ironically, in New York. Both parents were deceased—natural causes, I checked—but her brother-in-law was a mere fifteen minutes away.

Michael and Noelle Addison—Macey, it turned out, was Lynn's maiden name—lived in a row of 1950s semi-detached council houses around the back of a Tesco Superstore. There were no BMWs or Audis in the driveways here, but it wasn't a bad neighborhood. Before I got out of the car I checked my mobile and found the promised picture of Macey waiting for me. It was obviously taken from her driver's license and showed a pretty if unremarkable white woman with dirty blond hair. I squinted at the photo and decided her eyes were blue, or maybe gray, but definitely not hazel.

I knocked on the front door and it was answered by a fair-skinned woman with short, tousled brown hair who looked all of sixteen and whose head barely reached my chin. I wondered for a moment if this was Noelle Addison, but she gave me practiced once-over and I knew she was a copper.

"You must be Constable Grant. DCI Paget told me you were on your way," she said, and stuck out her hand. "DS Annette Kim. I'm FLO on this case."

I think I did a good job of hiding my surprise that someone this young was a DS. Maybe she was older than she looked. Well, she'd have to be or they wouldn't have let her into Hendon. I shook her hand and she led me into the house.

Through the cramped entryway was a living room, furnished in a shabby but comfortable sort of way. A couple of pillows and a duvet showed someone was using the couch as a bed, and an open suitcase in one corner was surrounded by a small explosion of clothes, charging cables, and other possessions. A teenage boy, recognizable as an older version of the boy in the photograph I'd seen in the Macey home, sat on the floor in front of a TV, playing the new Diablo game on a PlayStation. He spared us one quick glance and then turned back to the screen.

"This is Aiden Macey," Kim said. "Aiden, this is Constable Peter Grant. He's a specialist from London here to help find your mum."

This earned me a second glance. "Yeah?" he said. "What d'you specialize in?"

"Unusual cases," I said.

Aiden looked unimpressed. "Yeah, okay. Nice to meet you, I guess."

I was astonished by this display of good manners from someone under twenty years of age, though from her expression Kim wasn't. Perhaps she higher expectations of teenage boys. Having been a teenage boy, I knew better.

Kim ushered me into the kitchen-stroke-dining room where Michael Addison, heavyset white man with a receding hairline, sat at the scarred kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and checking messages on his phone. He stood when we walked in and shook my hand when Kim introduced us.

"I'm afraid my wife's not here right now," he said apologetically. "She's at the shops with Lucy—our daughter." He seemed uncertain about what to do next. I suspected his wife did most of the heavy lifting when they had guests.

I decided to put him out of his misery. "Mind if I have a seat?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, as though that had never occurred to him. "Of course. Tea?"

"Thanks," I said, and sat opposite his place. Kim leaned against a counter and Addison turned on the kettle. Despite having one less child, the Addison kitchen was significantly messier than the Macey kitchen. There was a strained quality to the house that I suspected was due to having too many people crammed into a too-small space.

"Do you know Lynn Macey well?" I asked.

"Oh, very," he said. "When Phillip was alive not a week went by that we didn't all see each other—dinner together, taking the kids to the park. Lucy and Katherine are very close."

"And after your brother died?"

"She… changed," Addison said. "She took it very badly. I mean, we all did, of course, but she became very distant. We saw her less often, holidays mostly, and when we did she seemed…" he shrugged. "I don't know. Distracted, restless."

The kettle clicked off. Addison hadn't got bags or mugs ready so he had to scramble to get the tea brewing before the water went cold. The wife was definitely in charge of guests, I thought, watching him.

"Does she have any unusual interests?" I asked. When Addison gave me a puzzled look, I tried to think of something that wouldn't bias him or make him suspicious. "New Age spirituality, anything like that. Or maybe someone new in her life." Paget had told me they already checked for a boyfriend and came up blank, but I thought maybe asking the question in a different context might jog something.

Addison considered the question carefully as he brought me and Kim each a cup of tea and topped off his own. It was good, solid builder's tea, and I got it in a mug with "#1 Dad" on the side and a small chip on the rim. I'd spotted a set of good china cups on the upper shelf of the cabinet when he got the mugs out but I didn't think he was being rude, just oblivious. But when he answered the question he was surprisingly insightful.

"She's always been an unusual woman," he said slowly. "I met her parents a few times before they passed, and they said she was an odd kid. She'd play all day in the woods, not come home until dark. And now she goes out all night." Addison shook his head, baffled. "She's a nice woman, very friendly. I've always liked her. But I always got the feeling that no matter what she was doing she'd always rather be somewhere else."

I brought up Macey's photo on my phone and showed it to him. "Is this photo a good likeness of Lynn Macey?"

"You know, I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Lynn before," he said. "Yeah, this is her. Why?"

"Just making sure it's a recent photo," I lied. "Are her eyes right?"

He frowned at that but dutifully squinted at the screen. "Blue? Yeah, she has blue eyes, like Katherine."

Both of the girls who'd had brushes with the fae in Herefordshire had hazel eyes. While a sample size of two was hardly conclusive, Macey's unchanged blue eyes seemed to indicate a lack of fae involvement in the case. Which was good because I'd had enough of fairies for a while, but bad because it meant I still had no idea what was going on.

I thanked Addison for his help and asked if I could talk to Aiden and Katherine. He glanced at the doorway to the living room and lowered his voice.

"Katherine's upstairs," he said. "She hasn't been taking it well at all. I'd rather you didn't upset her, if you didn't have to. But Aiden seems handling things better." He hesitated. "We… we haven't told them what you found this morning. Lynn's clothes, I mean. We don't want them to give up hope yet."

I glanced at Kim and she shrugged, but I couldn't tell if that meant she agreed with the Addisons' decision to keep the Macey kids in the dark or just didn't think it mattered at this stage. Either way, she didn't seem to have a problem with me talking to them so I went back to the living room and asked Aiden if I could play Diablo with him.

He gave me the pitying look of every teenager who's ever been confronted with an adult attempting to be "cool," but I had never been cool and wasn't trying to start now so I decided it didn't apply to me.

"I don't have the new one yet," I said. "I hear it has PvP mode."

Aiden shrugged apathetically. "Yeah, okay." He handed me a controller and I sat next to him on the floor.

I would like to say that I let him win as part of an advanced interrogation strategy designed to obtain optimal results from an uncooperative witness but the truth is he kicked my arse. Twice. On the bright side, he seemed to warm up to me a bit after that, so when he proposed a third round I asked him if he had any idea what happened to his mum.

He ran his hands restlessly over the controls without really touching them and didn't look at me. I thought he probably wasn't taking it better than his sister, just better at hiding it.

"I dunno," he said, which I recognized as a stalling tactic. Then he countered with a question of his own. "D'you think this is an 'unusual case?'"

He'd been paying more attention than I thought, to remember my exact words. "Yes," I said. "I do."

Aiden finally looked directly at me. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of blue but very fierce. "Why?" he demanded.

He wanted his mum's disappearance to be special, because if it was special it might be different, and if it was different it might end differently than so many disappearances—body found in forest, body found in river, body found in car. I knew Macey's disappearance was both special and different, but I didn't know if that was good for her chances or not. I wanted to tell him about this morning's find. He was fifteen, not a child anymore, and I thought he deserved to know the truth. But it wasn't my call.

"I've never seen a case quite like your mum's," I said. "And I've seen some pretty strange stuff."

He didn't ask if I thought we'd find her. It had been practically the first thing Joanne Marstowe asked me, when we were looking for her daughter. I waited while he looked down at the controller in his lap for a minute, and he finally said, as though the words were torn out of him, "I think she left."

"You think she left home Thursday night on her own?" I asked, to clarify.

Aiden looked like he regretting speaking. "No," he said, "I think she ran away from home. She left… us."

"What makes you think that?"

"She wasn't happy here," he said. "Not after Dad died. Maybe not even before that."

There was something else, but he wasn't going to tell me and I didn't think playing more video games together was going to change that. I handed him one of my cards.

"Call me if you think of anything, or need anything," I said. "Even if it seems weird."

He didn't say anything, but he did take the card.


End file.
